This invention relates to the control of an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) by a caller using control messages sent over the Internet.
An Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), is an arrangement for connecting a caller to one of a plurality of Agents served by that ACD. Many highly flexible arrangements for Automatic Call Distributors exist in the prior art. One highly flexible scheme is described in Gechter et al: U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,535, which discloses arrangements for routing an incoming call to the most appropriate Agent that is available. The selection of that Agent is carried out by an overall control system which is aware of the current status of all Agents, and of a user profile of callers. This system is also arranged as are many other ACDs, to accept input from callers, usually in the form of Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) signals, keyed in response to announcement queries from the ACD. A problem of the prior art is, that this type of control of the ACD gives very little opportunity for callers to interact with the ACD, and to select an optimum queue path for finding an appropriate Agent to serve their call, since, in the prior art, the selection process is handled almost entirely by the control of the ACD in a single tree-type selection process. Further, in the prior art, ACDs are viewed as stand-alone systems, not as part of an ACD network. Further, communication of data to an ACD Agent is inefficient and time-consuming, and may require the caller to hang up and restart the process.
The above problems are substantially alleviated and an advance is made over the teachings of the prior art in accordance with this invention, wherein an ACD is supplied with a User Controller such as a Personal Computer (PC), which interacts with a caller to provide information to the caller and to receive call direction information from the caller, and interacts with the Call Controller means of the ACD for establishing connections between the caller and a selected Agent, or between the caller and another ACD of an ACD network for completion by that other ACD. Advantageously, this allows the caller to control the selection of an appropriate Agent. In one preferred embodiment of the invention, a connection is established between the caller""s PC or data terminal and the PC User Controller of the ACD. The PC User Controller has access to the queues in the ACD in order to estimate the time required to reach a particular Agent, a particular sub-group of Agents, or any of the group of Agents handling the type of request that the user is making. The actual physical connection is between a user station and an Agent position. An Agent position is the means to permit an Agent to send and receive control signals to and from the ACD, and to provide a voice connection for the Agent.
For an ACD Network, one ACD is usually required to act as a Control ACD. This Control ACD controls hand-offs among ACDs, and monitors communications among the ACDs.
In accordance with one feature of Applicants"" preferred embodiment, many, if not most of the customer stations equipped to communicate with the Controllers of the ACD, are combined stations which communicate data for accessing queues and information storage of the ACD, and which also use the Internet querying connection for a talking connection to the Agent. Advantageously, the Internet can be used for both purposes.